Some Like It Hot is showing at Metrograph NYC from next Friday, May 24, through the weekend and again on Wednesday, May 29.
“Few works in film history have earned so many horselaughs through the years as has Wilder’s relentlessly zany gender-bender, featuring two of the most famous (even if fake!) beauty marks in Hollywood, courtesy Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. Joe and Jerry (Curtis and Jack Lemmon) escaping certain doom as witnesses to mob murders in Prohibition Era Chicago by donning showgirl drag and, as Josephine and Daphne, joining a Florida-bound all-female review. Complications ensue when Jerry catches the eye of an elderly millionaire, and Joe falls head over heels for Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn Monroe, in a role that makes the most of her talent for combining pathos and comedy). Wilder brings the sexual anarchy of the Weimar Berlin cabaret into Eisenhower America, in a work which has lost nothing of its spirited exuberance and zest for life.”
The screenings are part of an ongoing season on the whimsical theme of Animal Farm: Moles. Notably, Marilyn’s beauty mark in Some Like It Hot was on her chin, replacing the mole on her cheek from earlier years. (And strangely enough, The Evolution of Marilyn’s Beauty Mark is currently the most popular post on this blog!)
“Animal Farm returns with a deep dive into those denizens of the depths, the bashful, burrowing mole. You’ll see plenty of the small, squinty-eyed subterranean mammals on screen here, digging up a storm in films like Fantastic Mr. Fox and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, as well as the underground tunnel-dwelling human subjects of Dark Days, the hollow earth mutants of The Mole People and, for good measure, some homograph ‘moles,’ including the deep cover agents of The Departed and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Marilyn’s beauty mark (albeit a fake, her real one is covered up!) in Some Like It Hot.”
The Marilyn Report 